One thing that occurred to me today is that most people don’t realize that because Mozilla Developer Center’s documentation site uses Lucene for search, you can use powerful queries when searching to help limit your results to more closely match what you’re looking for.

You can do some pretty powerful stuff; for example, if you’re looking for information about XML templates, you can search on “XML and template”. This will leave out the articles on XUL templates.

You can also limit your search to just article titles, by using the “title” operator, like this: “title:(XML and template)”. This search prioritizes results that include both “XML” and “template” in the article’s title.

It’s also important to note that certain characters need to be escaped in your search queries, by prefacing them with a backslash. These special characters are:

+ – && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ ” ~ * ? : \

If you fail to escape these characters, you’ll get a somewhat cryptic error message about invalid syntax in your search query.

Hopefully this information will help you get more accurate and helpful results when searching MDC!